Sound disaster

[Jazz Rock]

Hi Guys,

I am mighty annoyed at my Epi LP. A friend of mine asked me to come up with a tune for a short film he is making. I picked up the Epi, tuned in open C for its growl and raw, close-to-the-bone feel. Came up with a few ideas noodling unplugged on Thursday night. Today I plugged it in to try develop things and see what sound I need... And that is where it becomes disastrous. I was simply unable to find an adequate sound. It had been a while I didn't plug it in and now I remember why!

It was sounding good when it was tuned in standard E, but the SD '59 with AIV mag currently in, can't seem to be able take the shift in frequency. The sound is a bit in your face, with loud bass and mids, yet sounding too polite. Only the out of phase middle position sounds half decent to my ear, with a certain dryness to it.

Despite the heavy down tuning, I am not playing metal as one could expect, but classic rock. So what I am after is dry and gritty break up sound, on the verge of the overdrive. What do you say I should try? I have experimented with mag swaps in the past, I could give it another try... Or shoudl I go down the P90 route, it works wonders in the neck of my Studio, but then this one is tuned in standard E. Any particular advice for a good while down tuning?

[Alex]

Black Dog!

[Telerocker]

Black Dog does great lower tunings.

[ericsabbath]

well... dry, gritty and slightly overdriven = aftermath

[dheim]

OR you can choose to act like a man (I'm joking, of course!) and go heavy and raw with an HB sized pig90! :) jokes apart it's awesome for raw rock tones as well as it slays with heavy, metal oriented distortions... Definitely worth trying in a LP.

[Jazz Rock]

Thanks for the feedback guys. I have listened to a few clips of each of the pups you suggested (there is a good load og Pig 90 clips thanks to Tom :). Good quality stuff but unfortunately, the break up sound doesn't seem to be fashionable these days. I'll need to remedy to this when I finally get round to record some stuff again... :/ Anyhoo, So difficult to say. The Pig 90 option is quite appealing to me, but the description of the Black dog does mention its ability to tackle bottom heavy tuning. Anybody has experienced with some of the above and the SD '59? How do they compare?

PS: How would the MQ behave under low tuning? Since I love this pup so much in my studio, maybe I should go MQ frenzy?!

[Jazz Rock]

Hey guys,

Thanks again for the feedback, I thought I would just share the outcome of my experiments from yesterday.

I thought I would take a kind of more "scientific" approach to finding a good sound with the downtuned Epiphone. SO What I did is take, one by one every single control dial and button on the amp, the guitar and then the FOD (overdrive pedal) and get them from central position, to max and then min and see if the sound was better or worse.

I fiddled with the conrtol like this for about an hour when I finally found a sound I like... I quite like actually, but I think I can see how better it could be with certain BKPs, more on that later.

So the settings are a tad extreme, but hey, it works out well:
I have truned off the bright switch on the LC15R, which I haven't really done in the past, always felt everything sounded better when on... well, not anymore. The bass and trebble knobs are down to 0, the mids cranked up to 10 (would have gone up to 12 if the amp allowed me. A wee amount of reverb helped as well.
But it is really when I started to concentrate on the guitar controls that I realised I was onto something. Tone knobs for boths pups were better when rolled up to 4, but no more, yet the real trick was to pull the the tone knobs to tap the pups (yeah, don't ask, I have tapped '59, no split coil...). At this moment and only then, have a grind slashed my face from ear to ear...
Quick tweaking of the FOD controls, again mainly to get rid of the trebble, and I found a brilliant sound for slide guitar.

Now I can see myself having lot of fun with these settings, and I will for a while. But I can't help thinking that BKP P90 is what I need in this guitar. I think when I have a bit of spare "change" I will contact Tim to ask him which ones he feels wouldbe the best in this guitar.

So I guess the message here really is, if you are struggling with humbuckers while downtuning, split, tapped or replacement sinlge coil pickups is the way to go.